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Preparing for Your First Virtual Advisory Board

April 26, 2017 | Blog

When preparing to initiate your first virtual event, whether it be a commercial or medical affairs advisory board, a clinical steering committee or even a patient advocacy session, following standard best practices can greatly increase your business results.

Today’s blog will focus on three critical practices that can have an enormous impact on your program’s overall results.

Get the most from your Client Success team

Virtual engagements are new for some, and many teams may feel uncertain when first getting started. However, Within3 clients overwhelmingly state that the guidance of the Client Success team from inception to execution (and beyond) has eliminated their initial fear of the unknown. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions, or to challenge why certain practices are better than others. Armed with the experience gained from hundreds of virtual engagements conducted all around the world, there’s little the Client Success team hasn’t encountered before.

Spend a bit of extra time thinking about your objectives

The need to answer key business questions, as well as the desire to move quickly and efficiently, are likely two of the reasons you chose a dynamic virtual setting. Be thinking about the desired outcomes from the very start. Talk through questions such as:

“What do we hope to achieve at the conclusion of the virtual event?”

“What will we do with the information, ideas and critical feedback once we have it?”

The better you can articulate how the session can affect your business goals, the more efficiently your virtual session can be designed and executed. These answers will help ensure the correct balance of content, questions, priority, and timing of virtual session components.

Increase stakeholder satisfaction by closing the post-session loop

Feedback from hundreds of online sessions consistently show that advisors and other external stakeholders want to do more than provide input– they want to know how their input will make a difference. Clients who provide advisor’s insight into how their contributions will impact business decisions or outcomes drive stronger loyalty as well as higher future engagement levels with advisors. Ask yourself the question “How will we communicate the end result over time with the stakeholders who helped us get there?” While there are multiple ways to accomplish this, one easy way is to utilize the virtual environment as a 24x7 place to post summary, follow-ups, and news to the advisors after sessions have ended.

Watch for an upcoming blog, where we’ll be sharing best practices and strategy on “Initial Engagement”.